Achievements, Awards

The Lab's mission is to develop and apply science and technology to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent; reduce global threats; and solve other emerging national security and energy challenges.

Discoveries, developments, advancements, and inventions pouring from Los Alamos make America—and the world—a better and safer place and bolster national security.

Cray Inc. has delivered a new supercomputing platform to support all three NNSA national laboratories: Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore. Named Cielo, this petascale (more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second) supercomputer will help NNSA ensure the safety, security, and effectiveness of the nuclear stockpile while maintaining the moratorium on testing. The computer has 96 cabinets with nearly 9,000 compute nodes, and approximately 300 terabytes of memory.

Discoveries, developments, advancements, and inventions pouring from Los Alamos make America—and the world—a better and safer place

It was here, for instance, that the Human Genome Project began . . . and other crucial efforts that many people don’t associate with Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Many measures of progress distinguish the people of Los Alamos and their work: awards, prizes, and patents, as well as the publication in leading journals of both original material and citations.

Los Alamos is home to the world’s most powerful x-ray machine, a tool essential to maintain the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons without returning to underground testing.

A Los Alamos team in March 2012 broke its own world record for strongest nondestructive magnet—surging past the elusive 100-tesla mark—clearing the way for a host of new endeavors, including a new type of superconductor.

A supercomputer was the world’s first to break the petaflop barrier at Los Alamos (a million billion operations per second) dramatically increasing the speed and fidelity of simulations to model everything from nuclear weapons implosions and the origin of our universe to mapping the evolutionary tree of the AIDS virus and how nanowires work.

Such extremes are dramatic in themselves.

But they’re only a means to an end: performing breakthrough experiments that advance the state of science as well as state of the art—all to bolster national security.

Supporting biosurveillance via the web
A new online resource is providing a centralized portal for all news, information, resources and research related to biosurveillance at the laboratory. January 28, 2015